DALLAS _ As the San Antonio Spurs brought a team to Dallas on Friday night that resembled their Austin D-League squad, they were still good enough to smash the Mavericks.
This is what the full-on tank mode can look like.
The Spurs' underlings dismantled the Mavericks. And by all appearances, they didn't even have the courtesy of passing along any secrets about rebuilding in the aftermath of a retiring superstar.
The Mavericks, scoring just eight third-quarter points, were overrun after halftime and dropped a 102-89 decision to the Spurs, who won for the 61st time this season despite sitting seven players, including all of their top four scorers. Six of the seven players who sat didn't make the trip to Dallas. The other, Tony Parker, suited up only as an emergency point guard.
But the Mavericks, who didn't play Dirk Nowitzki, Harrison Barnes or Wesley Matthews after halftime, made sure their express train to a deeper lottery pick stayed on the tracks.
What they also should have taken from the Spurs during their visit was just how to rebuild on the fly. The Mavericks are in the middle of it and the Spurs have already come out on the other end of Tim Duncan's retirement without missing a beat.
Will that be the case when Nowitzki goes through that door to real life?
"I don't think we've ever written out a recipe," Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. "It's not A, B, C, D. You know what you got to do and you try to do it. We're all trying to do the same things. Sometimes the picks you make, the decisions you make, work out and sometimes they don't. But I guess we've been pretty fortunate."
Yes, the Spurs are the poster kids for surviving the retirement of one of the greatest players of all time.
The Mavericks?
Things were so bad for them in the second half that, between the third and fourth quarters, a young lady made the shot of the game, swishing a half-court heave to win a big-screen TV.
And that was just five fewer points than the Mavericks scored in the entire third quarter, when they were outscored 25-8 and fell behind 75-69. It just got worse from there.
"When you lose somebody like Dirk or Timmy, you look down the bench and see who's going to be that next guy who can be impactful for your team," Popovich said. "And those kind of guys, you don't replace them very easily."
The Spurs got a little lucky with the rise of Kawhi Leonard, an MVP candidate, who stayed in San Antonio with Pau Gasol, LaMarcus Aldridge, Danny Green and Manu Ginobili, along with Dejounte Murray, who is legitimately injured.
